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Formlabs announced today the release of the Form 1, their “prosumer” desktop printer that uses stereolithograpy to produce highly detailed models.

“The Form 1 marries high-end stereolithography (SL) technology and a seamless user experience at a price affordable to the professional designer, engineer and maker.”

A common complaint of current desktop printers like Makerbot, Ultimaker, and RepRap that use FDM extrusion technology, is that the print quality is too low. The Form 1 tackles this head on and the high quality results speak for themselves. Another printer in the “at home” printing market is great news for consumers too. The Form 1 promises to be “An end-to-end package. Printer, software, and post-processing kit that just works. Right out of the box.”

The price is affordable though the regular retail price has not been announced. At $2499 it is comparable to the price of the Replicator 2.

They have a kickstarter campaign to manage pre-sales and generate funds to ramp up production. The machines are selling fast! They have reached their goal of 100K in 2.5 hours.

Formlabs is a Boston-based start-up founded by a trio of MIT grads with impressive backers like Eric Schmidt and Mitch Kapor. They’ve also enlisted Dragon Innovation, a manufacturing consultancy, to assist with the production of the printers and hopefully avoid the kinds of hurdles we’ve seen other successful kickstarter campaigns face.

We’ve just added 2 new 3D printing materials for your making pleasure. And for those who like acronyms, the process is Fused Deposition Modeling or FDM and the material is ABS — the same stuff legos are made out of.

These new glossy materials have high durability, decent detail and accuracy, but a rough surface.

and the origins of Dan’s Exclamation LampPonoko Personal Factory 4 opens up a new world of possibilities by combining more than one digital fabrication method as well as open source electronics.

Dan’s Exclamation Lamp on our home page is a fantastic example of this fusion, and we cannot wait to see what other designers will do with it.

We talked with Dan about how his lamp design came about, and why it is such an ambassador for the combining of fabbing methods:

Each fabrication method has its own strengths and weaknesses.
You can make a lamp using only laser cutting, but you are constrained by having to try and interconnect flat materials. You can make a lamp using only 3D printing, but you are limited in the material charactaristics available to you and the cost may be prohibitive.
Combining the two gives you the best aspects of both techniques.

Or how to avoid “smudgy yucky“Burn marks are an inherent part of the laser cutting process – we are cutting things with a highly focused beam of fire after all. There are some tricks to minimizing this issue for different materials, and this post deals with acrylic.

Most of the acrylic sheets we use come with protective paper on both sides. It’s possible for us to leave this paper on when making your design, which we tend to do where it will not interfere with your engraving. The main downside to this is needing to peel paper off both sides of the acrylic, which can be time consuming and tricky if your design is intricate.

Generally our rule is: cut with paper on both sides if there is no raster engraving in the design, or if all raster engraving is of the heavy variety. Heavy raster engraving burns through the paper without any trouble, as does heavy and medium vector engraving. If the file has medium or light raster engraving, however, we will remove the protective paper from the top of the material unless otherwise requested.

It is possible to use medium engraving through the paper, but due to the dot matrix nature of the raster engraving not all the paper is burned away. A slightly sticky residue may be left on the plastic if you ask for this option – which may need to be cleaned off before you use it.

Below are some typical examples of what you get when laser cutting acrylic. It should be noted that it is most obvious on black hence using it as the example material. Also the images have been zoomed in to great detail and emphasizes the effects more than might be obvious to the naked eye.

Cutting – Paper Left On vs Paper RemovedOn the left through the paper and on the right without paper. The right shows a clear example of the smudgy burn marks that are left on the acrylic after cutting. Clearly the shapes cut through the paper is cleaner than not.

Heavy Raster Engraving – Paper Left On vs Paper RemovedOn the left through the paper and on the right without paper. You can see that engraving through the paper produces a crisper result. The vaporized acrylic builds up around the outside of the letters when the paper is not use and produces this slightly ‘inflated’ look. This would probably polish off should you have the desire to do so.

Medium Raster Engraving – Paper Left On vs Paper Removed

On the left through the paper and on the right without paper. Again engraving through the paper is a little crisper in the letter forms, but as mentioned earlier there may be sticky residue left over from the adhesive of the paper.

So what does all this mean?

If you want us to leave the paper on, you should only use heavy raster engraving. If you use medium or light raster engraving, we will make your design with the paper removed.

If you would like to specify how you want your job cut, make a note in the Special Shipping instructions.

The Industrial Design Society of America held it’s annual conference in Portland last week. I had the great fortune to present Ponoko’s response to “DIY: Threat or Opportunity”. Of course we love DIY here at Ponoko and we strive to bring powerful manufacturing technologies to people of all making abilities. We believe if you minimise the barrier to making your ideas real then all sorts of amazing projects will be produced that might not have been otherwise. We see these show up in the Showroom all the time!

I also think DIY and making are at the very core of being a designer. The workshop is where we learn about the properties of materials, the abilities of tools and how to creatively engage both to make awesome stuff. The nature of the tools might be changing, getting more digital and “hands off”, but the experiential nature of making stuff is just as important as it was 100 years ago.

Some highlights in no particular order:

Chad Jennings from Blurb presented his interpretation of the DIY revolution as a 3 phase development. 1: Mass customization (Nike iD) 2: People Powered Products (Moo, Blurb, Ponoko, Shapeways), 3: Towards people powered businesses. Blurb allows people to publish their own books with the same quality as mass published books and that has allowed individuals to compete with the big publishers. He also highlighted the power of your social networks when trying to sell your products. Someone who posts their Blurb book to Facebook through a widget experiences a 300% increase in page views and a 80% increase in sales. He suggested goal for making a living was get 1000 fans who love what you do so much they will spend $100 a year on your products. Sounds easy, right?

Jay Rogers talked us through how Local Motors is co-creating unique cars. Designers submit their concepts and a voting system decides which cars are then developed (open and collectively) and built by Local Motors. He explained how they are building flexible manufacturing facilities close to the customers that want to buy them as this makes more sense than shipping large objects around the world (sound familiar?). It was also interesting to see how they combine custom parts with some off the shelf components (like engines and lights) to reduce the price of the end product, keeping it realistic. The coolest thing about Local Motors is that it gives designers, who may never have otherwise had a chance, to design cool cars with a chance of production.

Tine Latein provided us with a personal insight in the process of designing, manufacturing and market her awesome 3D printed Einzeller necklace. The design and manufacture was the ‘easy’ part for Tine and the marketing was where it got hard. The traditional route was what worked for this product. Combining traditional press articles with the sales and distribution network of a local gallery proved to be the best option. The gallery also understood the manufacturing story really well and were able to pass this to the customers. I think is an important point to note; if customers understand how something is made, from the designers story to the manufacturing, they are more likely to get involved on a personal level and spend the money. Even better if you are manufacturing with a rad new technology like SLM (selective laser melting).

Martin Van Tilburg walked us through the design and development of the Toideloi Stackhouse, a modular kid’s playhouse. Frustrated with not being able to make stuff well by hand, Martijn bought a small Shopbot router to aid in the development of the playhouse. What was interesting to note here is that having direct access to the machine (desktop manufacturing anyone?) allows you a lot better understanding of the process and quicker development time. The trouble he faces now is finding a manufacturer who can produce the same quality on a larger scale.

Ben Hughes from Central Saint Martins College in London provided the only counter point (sort of, that I saw anyway) to the view that DIY was an opportunity. He claimed the Reprap DIY 3D printer was like a blunt tool to his students. Digital manufacturing machines are tools, yes, but blunt tools? That depends on how you use it. A tool is only going to be as good as the person controlling it, be it a hammer and chisel, 6 axis CNC machine or a 3D printer. Sure there are some limits to what the DIY 3D printers can make right now but it is only a matter of time before that gets better and people start to push the design possibilities. He was surprised that 80% of the things on Thingiverse are parts for the machine itself and not more people sharing other (design) objects. The analogy we like to make is that DIY 3D printers are where personal computers were in the 70’s. They were still in the garage and in the hands of engineers. There is development needed to get them to the same easy to use level that computers were at when they became mainstream. The open source DIY 3D printer community is working together (though geographically separated) to continually improve the tech to make it easier for the next generation of users to get onboard and make cool stuff.

All in all it was an inspirational and fun week. Thanks to IDSA and Ziba for hosting a great event.

We have posted about the various DIY 3D printers on Ponoko before so it was great to be able to see them in action at Makerfaire.

The Makerbot guys were showing off their new Frostruder and a couple of new ABS colors. The red was super cool, it kind of glowed. They had a new design for a container for the plastic spool which was good to see. The spool can get out of control if not properly looked after. Also on the horizon is a new Plastruder design (the part that melts the plastic). The new design looks a lot more robust which will be fantastic.

With all the excitement around open source 3D printers, Nortd Labs is looking to do the same for laser cutters. With 30 days left in the Kickstarter project they have more than reached the target funding. Cant wait to see how this turns out. Check out the Kickstarter page for more info.

Making prototyping easierYou may have noticed that we updated the material thickness information for most of the materials in the US catalog recently. We did this to more accurately reflect the real properties of the materials we offer.

Previously we had based the data on the information we received from the supplier. Over time we noticed the stated thickness did not reflect the actual thickness and many of you queried this as if affected the outcome of your prototypes. So this change should make it easier for you to create awesome designs and reduce the number of prototypes that need to be made.

Note: the materials themselves have not changed at all, just how we label them. So if you have prototyped a design in a material and have the design files just perfect, everything will still work fine. (more…)